"In this tiny ebook I'm going to show you how to get started writing 6502 assembly language. [...] I think it's valuable to have an understanding of assembly language. Assembly language is the lowest level of abstraction in computers - the point at which the code is still readable. Assembly language translates directly to the bytes that are executed by your computer's processor. If you understand how it works, you've basically become a computer magician." More of this, please.

We had an Apple ][+ at school back in the early 80's, and I wanted to get as much as I could out of it, the only way was machine code.

I remember using CALL -151 so many times (3D0G to get back to Applesoft).

I got an Apple 2c in 84 that had the 62C02 chip, that gave you such things as BRA which I thought was the coolest thing ever (my friends C64's 6510 was even nicer, but that's another story).

I wrote code to put the //c into double hi-res, then using the video interrupt, wrote a small sprite routine that put a mouse cursor (copied pixel perfect from a Mac 128k image I had from a Byte magazine at the time). I even wrote a faux menu system that copied the Mac look and feel, right down to the Chicago font.

And that niceness was in a much less expensive package, but that's anot... hm, no wait, something like this goes on also in present ;p

Times have changed.

Didn't change totally; similar coding style still goes on with many microcontrollers (tons of them around), including some DIY stuff - this AVR "console" for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uzebox

Me, one day... I will make an Atari 2600 game - 128 bytes of RAM and racing the beam, here I come!
(I'm not really in a hurry though - in fact, I think that doing it on a half-century mark would be even more curious, so still 15 years to go; notably, also a 6502 variant)